


discarded pages

by screechfox



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Dissociation (due to being dead), He/Him Pronouns for Michael (The Magnus Archives), Identity Issues, M/M, Missing Scene, Surprise Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:54:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22621354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screechfox/pseuds/screechfox
Summary: Instead of Mary or Gertrude, Eric finds himself summoned by someone who looks like Michael Shelley and sounds like Michael Shelley, but is most definitelynotMichael Shelley.
Relationships: Eric Delano/Michael Shelley
Comments: 20
Kudos: 130
Collections: The Magnus Archives Rare Pairs 2020





	discarded pages

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taniushka12](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taniushka12/gifts).



> This doesn't precisely hit your prompt, but I hope you like it all the same!

Eric isn’t used to being pulled from the book. It’s only happened a few times since he died; always Mary’s bored voice reciting the way she killed him. Her tone would turn eager as she described her latest theories and discoveries, then it would fall into boredom again and she would dismiss him. He’d hesitate to call it pleasant, but it was routine.

(The pain was the only thing that never got easier. The sheer wrongness of existing past his own death hurt more and more every time Mary called him out of the nothingness of not-being.)

This time, the voice that pulls him into existence is different. Still familiar, but familiar in the way of glass shards on London pavement, of your home turning against you and eating you alive.

“Hello, Eric,” the voice says as Eric takes his first inhale in— who knows how long?

The figure in front of him looks like Michael Shelley: soft waves of pale yellow hair, round friendly face at odds with his height, that sharp-edged smile of satisfaction he had when he did something he was pleased with. But he seems off-set from the world, too-vivid and yet blurred at the edges.

“Michael?”

“If you must.” Michael sighs, and the sound is drawn-out, crackling with static that lingers in his voice when he speaks again. “That’s certainly a name. Contrary to my nature, but so would be any explanation I could offer you. I think you would prefer the simplicity of… Michael.”

Eric stares at him, but Michael examines his nails and doesn’t offer anything else. Perhaps the man Eric was would have been concerned or curious, but he’s well aware that death has left him a shade of himself. He’ll ask later, he thinks, but there are other things on his mind.

“Why am I in the Archives?” Eric had never expected to see the dark woods and green wallpaper of the Institute again — not that he’d expected to see  _ anything _ again before he died and Mary made him watch her dismember him. “Did Mary get bored of me?”

Michael giggles, and the sound echoes strangely, almost piercing.

“Maybe she did!” There’s a gleeful edge to his voice, a mocking sing-song amusement suffusing every word. “You were never that fun when you were alive, were you, Eric?”

“Is Gertrude here?” Eric asks. She might be a more productive conversational partner; Michael was always easily distracted at the best of times, and this seems rather more like the worst.

Without seeming to move at all, Michael’s face is very close to Eric’s. Eric flinches away, some stubborn survival instinct rearing its head even after his death.

“She left you here,” Michael hisses. His expression has contorted into stormy anger, voice gone dark and despairing. “She never could bear to face the consequences of her mistakes.”

“I wasn’t Gertrude’s mistake.”

Michael hums, the rage draining from him until there’s nothing left but distant contemplation. He raises one of his hands to Eric’s cheek, stroking across his skin, and Eric jerks back — he can  _ feel it. _ Michael smiles then, a cheerful wisp of a thing, following Eric’s movements. His hand is cold and heavy and not quite right, but it’s the most solid thing that Eric has felt in a long time.

(Somewhere in the back of Eric’s mind, he remembers: two young men, sharing kisses and caresses in between filing cabinets. It had never been anything serious, but sometimes Eric wonders if he broke Michael’s heart when he started seeing Mary.)

Michael’s fingertips brush across the curve of Eric’s eyelid — the curve that shouldn’t be there, not really, but physicality is apparently a malleable thing when you’re dead. It feels like knives dragging across that delicate skin, not quite hard enough to cut him, a gentle whisper of threat.

“No,” Michael says at last, very quiet. “You weren’t, were you?”

All Eric can see are Michael’s fingers, a strange echo of sharpness sending alarm bells ringing in Eric’s brain. But what is Michael going to do, kill him again? That might be a mercy. 

Instead, Michael’s hands move upwards, combing through Eric’s hair with gentle precision.

“Michael…” Eric trails off when Michael’s smile turns amused again, something pitying to its mocking curve. “What happened to you?”

“Gertrude,” Michael says simply, all fractured glass and bitter anger. It’s a feeling Eric can relate to, but it’s alien coming from poor romantic Michael Shelley.

“What did she do to you?”

Michael steps back, and there’s a faint flicker of something wistful at the center of Eric’s chest. He misses the closeness. That surprises him.

“No more or less than she would have done to you, had you stayed. You and Michael were two of a kind. I am… what is left. What should never have been. A possible impossibility, and an agonising contradiction. You and I are two of a kind too, in a way. Neither of us are meant to exist.”

“She sacrificed you,” Eric deduces.

“She sacrificed Michael to me, and then Michael became me, and I am… I  _ am.” _

“What are you?” Eric asks. Michael laughs.

“I am, quite simply, a liar. If I were you, I wouldn’t trust me. But then, if I were you, we wouldn’t be talking, would we? We would be inextricable from each other, a wound healing around the blade that caused it. Quite nasty, if you think about it.”

Michael leans in again. His breath is cold on Eric’s cheek.

“I want you to understand that Michael Shelley is gone, and Gertrude Robinson killed him.”

“I do understand,” Eric says. The sorrow it brings is as distant as anything else he’s felt since he died — anything that isn’t the constant wrenching pain of being trapped here, that is.

“Excellent!” All at once, Michael is across the room, leaning against a doorframe that definitely wasn’t in this room when Eric worked here. He examines his nails again, seemingly lapsing into boredom in a way that rather reminds Eric of Mary.

“Why did you summon me, if you aren’t him?”

At this, Michael’s movements still. He peers at Eric with dark unblinking eyes.

“Curiosity, I suppose. Or just a passing whim. It’s hard to say, and there’s no point saying it.”

“I always liked Michael,” Eric says, though he’s not sure why.

“Of course you did!  _ Everyone _ liked Michael Shelley, but no one cared about him, and there was no one left to miss him when he vanished into the places that never were.” Michael cocks his head, a funny little grin crossing his face that looks so much like Michael Shelley’s occasional scraps of boldness. “Would you like to come and visit them? It may even destroy you, if you are very lucky.”

It would be nice not to exist, Eric thinks faintly, staring at the impossible door that Michael is leaning against. But when he thinks of what he might have to lose, he surprises himself by having an answer.

“I want to talk to Gertrude,” Eric says. “There’s something I need to tell her. And I need to ask her about my Gerry. She can protect him, I know she can.”

Michael laughs, then sighs, then tuts. He waves one long finger, gently scolding.

“You’re still a fool. Beholden to her just as much as Michael was. A lamb to the Watcher.”

“What else can I do?”

Michael shrugs, leaning forward and forward and forward until he’s barely an inch from Eric’s face. His lips press to Eric’s, and each of them is as insubstantial and unreal as the other. Eric blinks — with what, he’s not sure — and Michael is leaning in the doorway, shrugging.

“Die, I suppose.” He sighs again. When he shakes his head, that pale yellow hair twists and curls around his shoulders. “Goodbye, Eric.”

And that’s that. Eric Delano doesn’t exist.

(Not until Gertrude Robinson calls him from his page, and he uses the one piece of leverage he has. He doesn’t ask about Michael — he doubts she’d give him a straight answer.)


End file.
